‘Killing Eve’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: “Smell Ya Later”

It’s Killing Eve Season 2, Episode 5, and Eve Polastri has officially gotten into bed with a psychopath…

Okay, well I guess, technically she already literally got in bed with Villanelle at the end of season 1…and I guess potentially, there’s some question of just who is and is not a psychopath at this point. So, how about we revise that idiom to: it’s Season 2, Episode 5, and Eve is officially dancing with the devil…

Of course, potentially, there’s a pretty good chance that the opposite of that could be true.

What I’m trying to say here is that it’s complicated. Because by the end of Episode 5—now officially an iconic “dinner with a side of sexual tension” episode placement in the Killing Eve canon—Villanelle may have been the one doing the sexy, stabby kitchen-sink-dipping, but it was certainly Eve who had taken the lead in the relationship. She sought out Villanelle’s, ahem, services; invited her into her home; and after briefly being tricked into believing she’d been poisoned, Eve has Villanelle working for her in return for little more than a forced thank you by episode’s end

Compare that to last season’s Episode 5 dinner scene, and we are dealing with a very different dynamic here. The mirrored images between Season 1’s first meeting between the assassin and the spy, and this season’s first post-stabbing meeting are overt and intentional. Both meetings announced themselves with an initial fancy gift, opened with some heated time spent against a hallway wall, made their way to the kitchen for some innuendo-laced sustenance, and ended with Chekov’s knife-to-the-abdomen. But where the first time Eve met Villanelle in the flesh, she was fearful of her gifts, terrified of her every move, attempting to protect herself—this time, Eve isn’t scared of Villanelle at all.

She’s lured Villanelle to her home on purpose, with intentions to use her. As an expert on psychopaths told Eve’s team earlier, “[Psychopaths] are pathologically manipulative, however they do respond to a certain amount of manipulation. You can’t change them, but you can manage them.”

The expert also says that we want to imagine a psychopath as “a regular person,” and then our minds simply add negative traits “like your violence, narcissism, sadism.” But that’s a mistake. “Don’t add; take away.” The expert says to subtract everything that makes us human, then copy it onto a human’s body, and that’s a psychopath. But that first thing—that human thing with the adapted negative traits of a psychopath born from obsession and exposure, that sounds kind of familiar too. That sounds a lot like…

Eve. Eve, who in the main publicity still for Season 2—y’know, the one where Villanelle is wearing the exact dress she wears in the dinner scene of this episode (which is to be much further discussed, I promise)—is dipping Villanelle as if leading her in a dance, with the words “Sorry Baby” scrawled across the frame. Villanelle may be the psychopath, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s always the one with the upper hand.

Villanelle and Eve reuniting in the kitchen where they first came face-to-face is a perfect scene, one we’ve been salivating for all season. Anytime Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are on screen together, this series—excuse me—climaxes in the grandest of fashions. It is entirely worth the wait, so please forgive me if I found the foreplay a little lacking. Eve might find The Ghost boring, but I don’t; so I was a little disappointed that we came into the episode after Eve had already had her initial interrogation with her. Apparently it didn’t yield much. “I wish she were a bit more…fun,” Eve tells Jess, just really not caring what her team thinks of her anymore. “Not everyone can be as exciting, as you know who,” Jess says. “You’ve been spoiled Eve.”

And so have we! But Killing Eve is no disciplinarian, so they’re ready and willing to give us more of what we want this episode by way of a truly absurd plot device. After Eve takes one more round with The Ghost and finds out that she refers to her fellow assassin Villanelle as “Dalygal Gwishin” (a Korean term for “egg ghost,” meaning a demon with no face), Eve decides that Villanelle is probably the only person in the world who could get The Ghost to tell them who she’s working for. Villanelle is an assassin for hire now—so why don’t they hire her?

Okay, sure! I mean, the woman does have some time on her hands. Other than her curating a collection of orgasmic jackets, and having stare-offs with bronze statue performers in the park, our girl is mostly just killing dummies with vanity license plates for a quick buck and then pouting about it to Konstantin. When they go to get their next freelance assignment, Konstantin makes Villanelle wait outside while he talks to “an old friend,” who we have to assume is Carolyn. When he returns, he has a photo of Eve as Villanelle’s next assignment, cause her to explode that she won’t do it. “You need to kill her, you’re a mess,” Konstantin tells Villanelle. “She’s making you weak—you used to be smarter than this.”

At MI6 headquarters, Jess also has a little wisein’ up advice for Eve. After Eve has rolled out her incredible plan to reunite with the assassin she shares a psychosexual obsession with, Jess points out that Eve never does any paperwork for all this crazy work she does on their team. Eve says that’s just not part of her job, and Jess tells her that’s the thing: “It is. For everyone, no exception. So if you’re not doing the boring stuff, that’s not because you’re special, it’s because someone doesn’t want a paper trail on you.”

Now, whoever wouldn’t want a paper trail on Eve’s infamously haphazard female assassin hunting?

Most definitely my second favorite episode of the season, especially because of it’s ultimate payoff, come with the “expert” on psychopaths Carolyn sends over to talk to the team. Martin has a PowerPoint presentation (the second of the season!), complete with a background with a fancy car he doesn’t know how to get rid of and the accidental inclusion of a bloody body that makes everyone flinch except Eve as he explains the dos and don’ts of psychopaths. At first, I just thought his bumbling and accidental slinging of crackers were a clever way to tell us a lot of information about psychopaths as mentioned above without having it seem like reading a textbook.

That it’s later revealed that Martin is a totally competent psychiatric expert, and his ineptitude was all a rouse to get an honest assessment of Eve’s handle on the Villanelle situation was even better. The assessment he gives Carolyn? “She’s too close, this is a no-go.” And Carolyn’s follow up with Eve about going through with getting Nico out of the house via the sudden need for a chaperone on a spelling bee so that she can meet up with her psychopath girlfriend and maybe get down to a little spy business? “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” (For the record, the word Carolyn won her 1973 British Spelling Championship with was Sisyphean: a task that can never be completed. Huh.)

And even though Eve knows Carolyn is purposefully putting all the impetus of this hugely bad idea on her, she still goes through with it and fires poor Kenny from the team when he dares to question the sanity of meeting up with an assassin that she recently stabbed. Then she dabbles with the idea of pushing a dude onto the subway tracks who bumped into her, gets so turned on by the flowers Villanelle sends to her house that she actually deigns to have sex with her husband, and takes off the bulletproof vest that Hugo fits her with because she doesn’t want to look bad on her third date.

It’s quite the episode for Eve! But Villanelle isn’t doing so well with the concept of getting to third base (assigned murder) with her spy-girlfriend either.

She somehow convinces the bellboy to who delivers her champagne to pet her hair because she’s “grieving.”

And when she arrives at Eve’s house wearing an absolutely stunning black tulle-and-lace mermaid gown, complete with a fascinator/veil, she explains that she’s “about to be in mourning.” She’s certainly dressed to kill, and they both know that’s what’s on the agenda. Plus there’s that small elephant in the room that Eve, y’know, stabbed Villanelle the last time she saw her, which she tells Villanelle she “thinks about all the time.” She asks Villanelle if she thinks about it. “All of the time.

Eve tells Villanelle she’s not going to apologize, and it was her idea to bring Villanelle there. “So you hired me to kill you? That is so stupid!” Villanelle exclaims, correctly. But Eve knows Villanelle, and she knows Villanelle wouldn’t have just hit her with a car or shoot her with a gun. She tells the assassin as much, and she jumps to the challenge, presenting Eve with the three pills she allegedly brought to kill her and a glass of champagne. Eve jumps to that challenge, gulping down the pills…

“WHY DID YOU DO THAT, WHAT DID YOU DO, EVE?!” Villanelle starts yelling, as Eve rushes to the sink to vomit up the arsenic, at which point Villanelle immediately starts cackling: “Of course it isn’t poison, do you think I’m insane?”

Villanelle doesn’t even question not working with Eve, she just grazes a cured blade down her abdomen and tells her she’s expensive. “I know,” Eve responds, and the next thing we know, Eve and Villanelle are on their way to a shipping container in the middle of the Forest of Dean, followed by Carolyn and Konstantin, unbeknownst to them.

Inside the shipping container is The Ghost, who Eve has had put there with no paper trail to be interrogated by a known assassin. “Would you like to watch?” Villanelle asks as she glides around this remote setting in her couture dress with her perfect blood-red lip. Eve says no, another interrogation that we don’t get to see takes place, and Villanelle comes out with the answer: Alistair Peele’s son Aaron is the one putting out the hits on his father and surrounding parties. Why? “He’s selling a weapon…it’s always a weapon.”

Villanelle, having handed Eve everything she wanted on a platter made of roses spelling out her name tells Eve that a thank you would be nice, and when she receives a forced one in reply, says, “You are just take, take, take.” Suddenly, Eve grows some sort of conscious and demands to know what Villanelle did to The Ghost to get her to talk, but Villanelle just storms off, and when Eve goes inside the shipping container, The Ghost looks up at her and simply whispers: “Monster.”

Finally, in the mistress-meets-spouse event of the century, Villanelle shows up in Oxford where Nico’s fieldtrip is taking place. With a sweater around her shoulders, and terribly pleated pants, she’s clearly ready to get on his level. “You look like someone stuck a mustache on some fudge,” she says as she sidles up to him. He starts walking away immediately, he says, to get away from the children, but once they’re in an alley, Nico pushes Villanelle up against the bricks by her neck. That was unexpected! “Good for you!” Villanelle mocks. “You should try this with your wife.”

Talk. About. A burn.

Nico makes his threats, but there’s not enough intention behind them to make them stick, and Villanelle soon has the upperhand again, telling Nico that she just came there to let him know he doesn’t have to worry about her hurting Eve. “We’re fine—well, more than fine, actually.” Plus, she’s been stabbed before, so Eve stabbing her when she came to her apartment in Paris wasn’t really that big of a deal. Oh, didn’t she tell him? “She laid down next to be on my bed and stuck a knife in me. Crazy, right?”

Villanelle tells Nico it’s so nice to finally meet him, and then hits him with those three words every husband of a spy entangled in a romance/partnership with an assassin hopes to hear one day: “Smell ya later.”

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream Killing Eve Season 2 Episode 5 ("Smell Ya Later") on BBC America